Never have I ever

When I arrived in Almaty, in Kazakhstan last Sunday it was warm enough to run outside. Around the hotel we stayed in, the path was clear and I did laps, four-tenths of a mile in a circle, taking care on the corners that I wouldn’t over or under-compensate and end up on my ass. I got inside after going around 11 times, and was smug in the way I am smug when I run after having been on a plane and travelling for twenty hours. You just need to move, I say — you got to. The next morning, I got up early and ran around the park further down and came into breakfast, feeling like I had managed to solve my problem of staying fit, that I wouldn’t end up gaining ten pounds, eating nuts and bread, the only food I assumed there would be in Kazakhstan, and something that was swiftly confirmed as I pecked at peanuts and dried apricots at breakfast, trying to avoid my diet becoming the topic of conversation.

The next two days it snowed and got too cold, and frankly dangerous, to keep up my obsession, and after watching a few YouTube videos, I convinced myself that I could run a loop in my hotel room if I learned how to run in place, something that turned out to be easier than I thought and I trotted back and forth and back and forth, for an hour, with a slow heart rate, the sort of slow heart rate I can’t normally manage, listening to British and American politics podcasts and looking out at the city as it got brighter and brighter. On the third day, there were mountains because it got cold enough that the clouds all dissipated and I thought about Sendai in Japan, which is on the other side of the island from Niigata and where you would have electric blue skies in the winter because all the snow from the Sea of Japan slammed into the Niigata side of the mountains.

During college, my roommate and I, fresh off our Intro to Philosophy with Lance Factor, whom we called The Lance Factor, were suddenly aware of cognitive dissonance around us. We started giving apologists like Paul Copan who came to visit our InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter a much harder time than all the unbelievers we were meant to be inviting. We settled at one point on the ‘moral evil of fishing', which we got to after thinking one night about pleasure and food production and how fishing was, if you really thought about it, completely unnecessary and basically a recreation of taking pleasure in fish suffering. This was partially a joke and partially not, something we ended up winding our chapter staff member up about, a square-jawed conservative Baptist guy called Doug, who I remember having an uncomfortable conversation with about homosexuality in which I tried to press the point that however much we might or might not be against it (I wasn’t, if I’m honest, entirely sure what it entailed), we needed to be careful if we were keen to share the gospel with people not to shoot ourselves in the metaphorical feet by coming out against something we didn’t need to come out against.

The moral evil of fishing snowballed into me actually becoming a vegetarian in the autumn of the next year, after I attended a very compelling lecture by Carol J Adams about feminism and meat production. I stopped eating meat through that autumn into the winter, causing all sorts of consternation with my parents around Thanksgiving and Christmas when I ate some early version of faux meat and we all agreed it was just a phase, something I would eventually grow out of. I did, that Spring when I got back at college and we had lunch after driving to and from church in Peoria to an incredibly conservative Presbyterian Church of America Church where I became a Calvinist and started reading Calvin in my free time. After the service, on Sundays, the Knox College cafeteria had ‘not-so-lucky cluckies’ which were chicken fingers we ate with our own mixed honey mustard sauce and glasses of Cherry Coke. I was fat in the way you are fat when you are in college, fat but you know you can always be skinny if you just put a bit of effort into it, which of course I never did because I had always been fat and it didn’t seem to really matter to me.

On Friday, in a EuroSpar cafe, standing at a counter eating oranges, looking out at the street in the dark, some fifteen degrees below zero and preparing to become a vegan again at a final meal, I suddenly felt homesick. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas was playing on the loudspeaker, which seemed odd, particularly because Kazakhstan is a Muslim country and we had all expected less Christmas than there was. I felt panicked that I’d missed my daughter’s drama performance, the second one I missed in 2023 for my job, and the only two she will ever have as a fourteen-year-old. I had told myself it would be okay, she had told me it was fine, but it wasn’t fine, was it. The year was gone — I’d not done any of the things that mattered, that I’d set out to do. What was I doing here, what was the point of any of this, eating oranges out of a plastic bag like some kind of moral victory. You only become a vegan when you eat, the rest of the time you can be an academic or an American or father. I threw my rubbish in the bin and promised I wouldn’t do this again, that I wouldn’t miss another drama performance or travel on a Sunday, and pretend like I’m something I’m not, come halfway around the world to make things awkward for everyone.

You can eat meat for years and years and then someone says something and you can’t eat meat anymore. I’m trying to get off butter, I say joking in June of 2018 and Yoko and I are laughing about it, when we used to get coffee together, before the pandemic, before everything that happened after that — it’s just a joke, just a thing I’m trying for a few days or weeks. It’s not tenable as a long-term lifestyle choice, I say, arguing about milk with a vegetarian as I insist I’ll go back in a few months. I’m sure I’ll come to my senses. You go one day, and another day, and another day and suddenly you’re a thing. You stopped eating meat enough days to be a vegetarian. You haven’t had dairy in five and half years, you’re a vegan. You stopped believing enough years that you’re an atheist. Am I? I want to say. I’m just trying some things out for a few decades. I’m sure I’ll go back to what I was. Some things cannot be undone. Someone can say I love you one hundred times, and then say they don’t love you once, and you will never trust their love ever again. It cannot be taken back. You can’t weigh I love you against I never loved you. I never loved you will always win. I look back at myself through time, through years of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons: eat the fucking butter, Stephen, don’t stop. It will be easier if you just eat the fucking butter.